Spartacus and Gladiators, with Mary Beard

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening to The Rest is History.

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Speaker 2 Hello, everyone. It's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history.

Speaker 2 And today, we're looking at gladiators. Here's a short extract of that episode.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody, and welcome to the last of our sensational classically themed bonuses for you, our beloved members. The great Mary Beard is still here.

Speaker 2 Obviously, her main focus at the moment is Instant Classics, her sensational podcast with Charlotte Higgins.

Speaker 2 But back in the mists of time, she co-authored a book on the Colosseum,

Speaker 2 probably the most iconic building in the whole of Rome, the kind of great emblem of the Roman Empire. And so for our final episode, what else could we do but? gladiators.

Speaker 2 We've done an episode on the Colosseum and the rest of its history. We've done one on gladiators.
But what we haven't done is an episode on the most famous of all gladiators, namely Spartacus.

Speaker 2 So I thought that that's what we would structure today's episode around.

Speaker 2 But Mary, before we come to Spartacus, can I just ask you, suppose you had the opportunity to go back in a time machine and to watch a gladiatorial show.

Speaker 2 Do you think you would avail yourself of that opportunity?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I mean, it puts you on the spot, doesn't it? You know, I've written about gladiators.
I've researched them, and then am I going to say, no, I wouldn't go and have a look.

Speaker 3 I think that when it comes to kind of morals, I'd have to say to myself, look, you went to see Gladiator 1 and the movies, and you went to see Gladiator 2.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 okay,

Speaker 3 those weren't real. The kind of violence that you saw was staged, CGI and all the rest.

Speaker 3 But it sure looked real. So I wonder what the difference is between watching that at the movies and watching it in the open air with real human beings.

Speaker 3 And I think that's a slightly more profound question than it might sound.

Speaker 2 Do you think that

Speaker 2 the obvious fascination that people have for the idea of gladiators, what's that, is that telling us anything about what people find interesting in ancient Rome per se, do you think?

Speaker 3 Quite difficult.

Speaker 3 If you quiz people and put them on the spot just like you put me on the spot, they will say, oh, you know, this is one of the,

Speaker 3 there are many blots on the national record of Rome, but gladiators comes pretty high in the list of the unacceptable about Rome.

Speaker 3 I think that you have to weigh that against the fact that thousands, hundreds of thousands of little model gladiators are still bore outside the Colosseum.

Speaker 3 That until the photograph trade was banned, people paid a lot of money to have their own photographs taken outside the Colosseum with people pretending to be gladiators.

Speaker 3 I think that we probably need to look quite carefully at our own fascination.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, the implication of that is that the interest that people feel, being gladiators, the obvious fascination, is speaking to something perhaps that is deep within all humans rather than being culturally specific to Rome.

Speaker 2 Do you think?

Speaker 3 Well, I'm trying to avoid saying that, but I can see

Speaker 3 you on that. But I can see why you glossed my answer in that way.
You know, I think that

Speaker 3 one of the things, and I don't know whether this is universal or culturally specific, one of the things that attracts people to Rome is that sense of over-the-topness.

Speaker 3 And that's over-the-topness when it comes to sex, when it comes to violence, when it comes to cruelty. And, you know, maybe Rome remains a place

Speaker 3 where we can explore that side of ourselves, but safely under the kind of alibi that this is all about ancient history.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 I think that's very nice, very nicely put.

Speaker 2 A very quick overview of the life and career of Spartacus for those who may not know it.

Speaker 2 He is a gladiator who escapes, who inflicts a number of defeats on the Romans.

Speaker 2 He is

Speaker 2 finally cornered by Crassus, who we were talking about in our previous episode, one of the triumvirate with Julius Caesar and with Pompey, who also plays a role in the defeat of Spartacus, as we will see.

Speaker 2 And if you believe the Kirk Douglas film, he doesn't die in battle, but is one of a number of slaves who get crucified along the line of the Via Appia the great road that leads south from Rome towards the heel of Italy

Speaker 2 and what do we know about him before he becomes a slave I I know that he's a Thracian so he comes from Bulgaria doesn't he because I went to Bulgaria in the summer And there's a town called Sandansky, which has a bitter feud with a neighbouring town over where Spartacus come from.

Speaker 2 And they both claim that they were his birthplace. But Sandansky has built an enormous muscle-bound statue of Spartacus.
So I think they now have bragging rights.

Speaker 2 But presumably, we don't know for sure where exactly he was born.

Speaker 3 Ancient writers agree that he was from Thrace. I've always thought it a bit odd that one of the special gladiator types, because gladiators come in various varieties with different armor,

Speaker 3 one is supposed to be a Thrax, a Thracian, and you think, is there some confusion here

Speaker 3 about where he came from and his gladiator type? But ignoring my skepticism, everybody says he's from Thrace. There's a sense that he might have been a mercenary.
He might even have served

Speaker 3 even for the Romans as a mercenary. But at this point, it all gets very murky.

Speaker 2 But he ends up, doesn't he, in Campania, which is the... the area of Italy around the Bay of Naples.

Speaker 2 And it has particular links, perhaps with the origins of gladiatorial combat. It's famous for its gladiatorial schools.

Speaker 2 But before we come to gladiators, could we just focus on the process by which, if he did come from Thrace, he might have ended up in Italy, because he is just one of hundreds of thousands of people from the Eastern Mediterranean who are following that road, aren't they?

Speaker 3 I mean, euphemistically, we'd say he was a prisoner of war.

Speaker 3 What that means is that he's sold into slavery.

Speaker 3 He's either kept by the soldiers, the Roman soldiers and the general, but more often

Speaker 3 they are literally taking into slavery, enslaving vast numbers of the conquered populations of the Eastern Mediterranean. I mean

Speaker 3 the process

Speaker 3 of enslavement followed by the transportation of those slaves to Italy to fulfill all the kind of tasks that slaves do from agriculture to domestic service to gladiatorial combat to whatever it it is one of the biggest movements of people for enforced movements of people that there has ever been i mean it is one guess would be that you've got uh a million slaves in italy yeah so almost maybe a quarter of the population something like that yeah And

Speaker 2 one of the things about this population transfer is that it's not just Thracians or people whom the Greeks would have classified as barbarians and therefore, according to Aristotle, fitted to work as slaves, but Greeks themselves.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's what they really find offensive, isn't it?

Speaker 3 Yes, I mean, and the

Speaker 3 kinds of tasks done by slaves

Speaker 3 are not all what we think of as menial tasks. I mean, some of them are, you know, forced labor in the fields, but quite a lot of teachers, doctors in Rome

Speaker 3 would be slaves. And those presumably are captured members of the Greek, the Greek towns that were taken by Rome.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so Delos, a small island in the Aegean, and Rhodes, which preserves a kind of precarious semi-independence. Both of these become great centres of the slave trade.

Speaker 2 And the descriptions of the number of people who are passing through the slave markets there gives you a very vivid sense of the kind of the dislocation that Roman power is bringing to the East.

Speaker 3 Yeah, people visit Delos now. It's one of the glorious islands of the Mediterranean.
Its past

Speaker 3 is absolutely enmired

Speaker 3 in slavery and its prophets.

Speaker 3 And certainly a lot of that comes from... war, but when we were talking about Julius Caesar, we talked about pirates.

Speaker 3 I mean, one of the ways that the pirates in the Mediterranean are making their living is, you know, they kidnap someone, they might kill them in the end.

Speaker 3 More profitable if they can't get a ransom to sell them into slavery.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening.

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